code – Luke Palmerhttps://lukepalmer.wordpress.com
Functional programming, philosophy, education, musicFri, 09 Dec 2016 15:23:19 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngcode – Luke Palmerhttps://lukepalmer.wordpress.com
Algebraic and Analytic Programminghttps://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2014/03/04/algebraic-and-analytic-programming/
https://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2014/03/04/algebraic-and-analytic-programming/#commentsTue, 04 Mar 2014 22:52:39 +0000http://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/?p=2460Continue reading Algebraic and Analytic Programming→]]>The professor began my undergrad number theory class by drawing a distinction between algebra and analysis, two major themes in mathematics. This distinction has been discussed elsewhere, and seems to be rather slippery (to mathematicians at least, because it evades precise definition). My professor seemed to approach it from a synesthetic perspective — it’s about the feel of it. Algebra is rigid, geometric (think polyhedra) , perfect. The results are beautiful, compact, and eternal. By contrast, analysis is messy and malleable. Theorems have lots of assumptions which aren’t always satisfied, but analysts use them anyway and hope (and check later) that the assumptions really do hold up. Perelman’s famous proof of Poincare’s conjecture, as I understand, is essentially an example of going back and checking analytic assumptions. Analysis often makes precise and works with the notion of “good enough” — two things don’t have to be equal, they only need to converge toward each other with a sufficiently small error term.

I have been thinking about this distinction in the realm of programming. As a Haskell programmer, most of my focus is in an algebraic-feeling programming. I like to perfect my modules, making them beautiful and eternal, built up from definitions that are compact and each obviously correct. I take care with my modules when I first write them, and then rarely touch them again (except to update them with dependency patches that the community helpfully provides). This is in harmony with the current practice of denotative programming, which strives to give mathematical meaning to programs and thus make them easy to reason about. This meaning has, so far, always been of an algebraic nature.

What a jolt I felt when I began work at Google. The programming that happens here feels quite different — much more like the analytic feeling (I presume — I mostly studied algebraic areas of math in school, so I have less experience). Here the codebase and its dependencies are constantly in motion, gaining requirements, changing direction. “Good enough” is good enough; we don’t need beautiful, eternal results. It’s messy, it’s malleable. We use automated tests to keep things within appropriate error bounds — proofs and obviously-correct code would be intractable. We don’t need perfect abstraction boundaries — we can go dig into a dependency and change its assumptions to fit our needs.

Much of the ideological disagreement within the Haskell community and between nearby communities happens across this line. Unit tests are not good enough for algebraists; proofs are crazy to an analyst. QuickCheck strikes a nice balance; it’s fuzzy unit tests for the algebraist. It gives compact, simple, meaningful specifications for the fuzzy business of testing. I wonder, can we find a dual middle-ground? I have never seen an analytic proof of software correctness. Can we say with mathematical certainty that our software is good enough, and what would such a proof look like?

]]>https://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2014/03/04/algebraic-and-analytic-programming/feed/5luquiThe Planhttps://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/the-plan/
https://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/the-plan/#commentsMon, 01 Apr 2013 21:04:17 +0000http://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/?p=2154Continue reading The Plan→]]>Last September, I decided that it was time to get a programming job again. After two months of trying to find paid work (of any kind, $10 would have been great!) as a composer, I realized that it’s really hard. There are a lot of people willing to work for free, and without much of a scoring portfolio (as opposed to the “pure music” I do) I have no way to distinguish myself to the studios that have a budget. Also, a lot of games want orchestral scores, and I don’t have the hardware and software I need to make convincing-sounding synthetic orchestral scores. Also, I’m sure once I get the necessary hardware and software, I will need time to practice with it. In short, I needed money and time. I am extremely fortunate to have, in my free-flowing way, stumbled onto a skill that is valued by the economy, and so I decided it was once again time to utilize that skill to achieve my other goals. I planned to live reasonably cheaply, save up money so that I can buy equipment and support myself for enough time to build up a portfolio by doing free projects.

Now I have been programming for Clozure for almost six months. As far as jobs go, it’s great. I get to work in my favorite language, Haskell, and they give me enough freedom to experiment with designs and come up with solutions that not only work, but that I would even consider good. My fear of programming jobs was based on having jobs where I constantly have to compromise my values, either by working in crappy languages or on startup-style timelines where there is no time to lose. With this job, I feel reunited with my love of software, and my inspirations for developer support tools have been once again ignited.

And so I have amended the plan: after I have saved enough money to support myself for several years, I will not only attempt to bootstrap a career composing, but dedicate my current work week to making a reality the software ideas which have been floating around in my head for half a decade. This prospect really excites me — the reason I have not been able to make my ideas is mostly the time pressure: there’s was always something else I should be doing, and so I always felt guilty working on my pet projects. I wonder, what am I capable of if my pet projects are the main thing?

I want to revive CodeCatalog. Max and I lost steam on that project for a number of reasons.

Due to family pressure, I returned to school.

I fell in love with a girl and got my heart all broken. That can be kind of a downer.

The priorities of the project compromised my vision. We were attempting to use modern wisdom to make the project successful: first impressions and intuitive usability came first. Our focus was on making it pretty and satisfying to use (which took a long time since neither of us were experienced web front-end developers), and that required me to strip off the most interesting parts of the project because noobs wouldn’t immediately understand it.

So I want to re-orient (3) to make it more satisfying for me. I want to allow myself to make the large strides that I envisage rather than baby-stepping toward success — to encourage myself to use my own talents in design and abstraction rather than trying to be a front-end person, to emphasize the exciting parts (what Audrey Tang calles -Ofun). By funding myself, I will not feel the guilt that comes with working on a project at the same time as (1). I can do no more than hope that something like (2) doesn’t happen. (I have a wonderful, stable and supportive relationship right now, so if that continues, that’d cover it :-)

I have many ideas; the reason I want to return to CodeCatalog in particular is mainly because I have identified most of my ideas as aspects of this project. My specific fancies change frequently (usually to things I have thought about before but never implemented), and so by focusing on this project in a researchy rather than producty way, I can entertain them while still working toward a larger goal and eventually benefitting the community.

Here is a summary of some ideas that fit in the CodeCatalog umbrella (just because I’m excited and want to remember):

Inter-project version control — I have always been frustrated by the inability of git and hg to merge two projects while still allowing interoperation with where they came from. The “project” quantum seems arbitrary, and I want to globalize it.

Package adapters — evolving the interface of a package without breaking users of the old interface by rewriting the old package in terms of the new one. There is a great deal that can be done automatically in this area with sufficient knowledge about the meaning of changes. I talked with Michael Sloan about this some, and some of the resulting ideas are contained in this writeup.

Informal checked documentation — documenting the assumptions of code in a machine-readable semi-formal language, to get the computer to pair-program with you (e.g. you write a division x/y and you have no y /= 0 assumption in scope, you’d get a “documentation obligation” to explain in english why y can’t be 0).

Structural editing — coding by transforming valid syntax trees. Yes it’d be cool, but the main reason it’s compelling to me is in its synergy with other features. Once you have the notion of focusing on expressions, holes with contextual information (a la Agda), semi-automatic creation of package and data-type adapters, smarter version control (e.g. a change might rename all references to an identifier, even the ones that weren’t there when the change was made) all come as natural extensions to the idea.

I think the challenge for me will be to focus on one of these for long enough to make it cool before getting distracted by another. My plan for that is to set short-term goals here on my blog and use it to keep myself in check. I am considering involving other people in my project as a way to keep myself focused (i.e. maybe I can make a little mini-kickstarter in which my devotees can pledge small amounts in exchange for me completing a specific goal on time).

This is all two years away or more, which feels like a long time, but in the grand scheme is not that long in exchange for what I see as the potential of this endeavor. I’m just excited and couldn’t help but to think about it and get pumped up. Thanks for reading!

Oh, despite the date, this is totally not an April Fools joke (as far as I know ;-).

]]>https://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/the-plan/feed/2luquiConstructions on Typeclasses, Part 1: F-Algebrashttps://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/constructions-on-typeclasses-part-1-f-algebras/
https://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/constructions-on-typeclasses-part-1-f-algebras/#commentsTue, 12 Mar 2013 05:58:23 +0000http://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/?p=2102Continue reading Constructions on Typeclasses, Part 1: F-Algebras→]]>This post is rendered from literate Haskell. I recommend doing the exercises inline, so use the source.

Certain kinds of typeclasses have some very regular instances. For example, it is obvious how to implement (Num a, Num b) => Num (a,b) and (Monoid a, Monoid b) => Monoid (a,b), and similarly if F is some applicative functor, (Num a) => Num (F a) and (Monoid a) => (Monoid F a) are obvious. Furthermore, these instances (and many others) seem to be obvious in the same way.

It would be straightforward for these cases to derive the necessary implementations from the type signature. However, it would be nice if there were a more abstract perspective, such that we didn’t have to inspect the type signature to find the operations – that they could arise from some other standard construction. Further, it is not quite as obvious from the the type signature how to automatically instantiate methods such as

mconcat :: (Monoid m) => [m] -> m

without making a special case for [], whereas hopefully a more abstract perspective would inform us what kinds of type constructors would be supported.

In this post, we will see such an abstract perspective. It comes from (surprise!) category theory. I disclaim that I’m still a novice with category theory (but in the past few weeks I have gained competence by studying). So we will not get very deep into the theory, just enough to steal the useful concept and leave the rest behind. I welcome relevant insights from the more categorically educated in the comments.

F-Algebras

The unifying concept we will steal is the F-algebra. An F-algebra is a Functor f and a type a together with a function f a -> a. We can make this precise in Haskell:

>type Algebra f a = f a -> a

I claim that Num and Monoid instances are F-algebras over suitable functors. Look at the methods of Monoid:

mempty :: m
mappend :: m -> m -> m

We need to find a functor f such that we can recover these two methods from a function of type f m -> m. With some squinting, we arrive at:

Exercise 4: For what kinds of type constructors c is it possible to automatically derive instances for (a) pairs and (b)Applicatives for a typeclass with a method of type c a -> a. (e.g. mconcat :: [a] -> a). Demonstrate this with an implementation.

Combining Classes

Intuitively, joining the methods of two classes which are both expressible as F-algebras should give us another class expressible as an F-algebra. This is demonstrated by the following construction:

find a suitable combinator for forming algebras over a product functor. It may not have the same form as coproduct’s combinator! What would a typeclass formed by a product of two typeclasses interpreted as F-algebras look like?

Free Constructions

One of the neat things we can do with typeclasses expressed as F-algebras is form free monads over them – i.e. form the data type of a “syntax tree” over the methods of a class (with a given set of free variables). Begin with the free monad over a functor:

(Church-encoding this gives better performance, but I’m using this version for expository purposes)

Free f a can be interpreted as a syntax tree over the typeclass formed by f with free variables in a. This is also called an “initial algebra”, a term you may have heard thrown around in the Haskell community from time to time. We demonstrate that a free construction over a functor is a valid F-algebra for that functor:

Exercise 7: Give a monoid isomorphism (a bijection that preserves the monoid operations) between Free MonoidF and lists [], ignoring that Haskell allows infinitely large terms. Then, using an infinite term, show how this isomorphism fails.

This program ought to be well-behaved — it has no recursion (or recursion-encoding tricks), no undefined or error, no incomplete pattern matches, so we should expect our types to be theorems. And yet we can get inconsistent. What is going on here?

Exercise: Identify the culprit before continuing.

The problem lies in the interaction between GADTs and generalized newtype deriving. Generalized newtype deriving seems to be broken here — we created a type B which claims to be just like A including instances, but one of A‘s instances relied on it being exactly equal to A. And so we get a program which claims to have non-exhaustive patterns (in unSwitchB), even though the pattern we omitted should have been impossible. And this is not the worst that generalized newtype deriving can do. When combined with type families, it is possible to write unsafeCoerce. This has been known since GHC 6.7.

In this post I intend to explore generalized newtype deriving and GADTs more deeply, from a more philosophical perspective, as opposed to just trying to plug this inconsistency. There are a few different forces at play, and by looking at them closely we will see some fundamental ideas about the meaning of types and type constructors.

Generalized newtype deriving seems reasonable to us by appealing to an intuition: if I have a type with some structure, I can clone that structure into a new type — basically making a type synonym that is a bit stricter about the boundaries of the abstraction. But the trouble is that you can clone parts of the structure without other parts; e.g. if X is an applicative and a monad, and I declare newtype Y a = Y (X a) deriving (Monad), then go on to define a different Applicative instance, I have done something wrong. Monad and applicative are related, so you can’t just change them willy nilly as though they were independent variables. But at the very least it seems reasonable that you should be able to copy all the structure, essentially defining a type synonym but giving it a more rigorous abstraction boundary. But in Haskell, this is not possible, and that is because, with extensions such as GADTs and type families, not all of a type’s structure is clonable.

I’m going to be talking a lot about abstraction. Although the kind of abstraction I mean here is simple, it is one of the fundamental things we do when designing software. To abstract a type is to take away some of its structure. We can abstract Integer to Nat by taking away the ability to make negatives — we still represent as Integer, but because the new type has strictly fewer operations (it must be fewer — after all we had to implement the operations somehow!) we know more about its elements, and finely tuning that knowledge is where good software engineering comes from.

When implementing an abstraction, we must define its operations. An operation takes some stuff in terms of that abstraction and gives back some stuff in terms of that abstraction. Its implementation must usually use some of the structure of the underlying representation — we define addition on Nat by addition on Integer. We may take it for granted that we can do this; for example, we do not have trouble defining:

sum :: [Nat] -> Nat

even though we are not given any Nats directly, but instead under some type constructor ([]).

One of the properties of type constructors that causes us to take this ability to abstract for granted is that if A and B are isomorphic (in a sense that will become clear in a moment), then F A and F B should also be isomorphic. Since we, the implementers of the abstraction, are in possession of an bijection between Nats and the Integers that represent them, we can use this property to implement whatever operations we need — if they could be implemented on Integer, they can be implemented on Nat.

This isomorphism property looks like a weak version of saying that F is a Functor. Indeed, F is properly a functor from a category of isomorphisms in which A and B are objects. Every type constructor F is a functor from some category; which category specifically depends on the structure of F. F's flexibility to work with abstractions in its argument is determined by that category, so the more you can do to that category, the more you can do with F. Positive and negative data types have all of Hask as their source category, so any abstractions you make will continue to work nicely under them. Invariant functors like Endo require bijections, but fortunately when we use newtype to create abstractions, we have a bijection. This is where generalized newtype deriving gets its motivation -- we can just use that bijection to substitute the abstraction for its representation anywhere we like.

But GADTs (and type families) are different. A functor like Switch b has an even smaller category as its domain: a discrete category. The only thing which is isomorphic to A in this category is A itself -- whether there is a bijection is irrelevant. This violates generalized newtype deriving's assumption that you can always use bijections to get from an abstraction to its representation and back. GADTs that rely on exact equality of types are completely inflexible in their argument, they do not permit abstractions. This, I claim, is bad -- you want to permit the user of your functor to make abstractions.

(Aside: If you have a nice boundary around the constructors of the GADT so they cannot be observed directly, one way to do this when using GADTs is to simply insert a constructor that endows it with the necessary operation. E.g. if you want it to be a functor from Hask, just insert

Fmap :: (a -> b) -> F a -> F b

If you want it to be a functor from Mon (category of monoids), insert:

Fmap :: (Monoid n) => MonoidHom m n -> F m -> F n

(presumably F m already came with a `Monoid` dictionary). These, I believe, are free constructions -- giving your type the structure you want in the stupidest possible way, essentially saying "yeah it can do that" and leaving it to the consumers of the type to figure out how.)

In any case, we are seeing something about GADTs specifically that simple data types do not have -- they can give a lot of different kinds of structure to their domain, and in particular they can distinguish specific types as fundamentally different from anything else, no matter how similarly they may behave. There is another way to see this: defining a GADT which mentions a particular type gives the mentioned type unclonable structure, such that generalized newtype deriving and other abstraction techniques which clone some of a type's structure no longer succeed.

]]>https://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/how-gadts-inhibit-abstraction/feed/4luquiDI Breakdownhttps://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/di-breakdown/
https://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/di-breakdown/#commentsTue, 15 Jan 2013 23:21:25 +0000http://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/?p=2039Continue reading DI Breakdown→]]>I’m having a philosophical breakdown of the software engineering variety. I’m writing a register allocation library for my current project at work, referencing a not-too-complex algorithm which, however, has many degrees of freedom. Throughout the paper they talk about making various modifications to achieve different effects — tying variables to specific registers, brazenly pretending that a node is colorable when it looks like it isn’t (because it might work out in its favor), heuristics for choosing which nodes to simplify first, categorizing all the move instructions in the program to select from a smart, small set when the time comes to try to eliminate them. I’m trying to characterize the algorithm so that those different selections can be made easily, and it is a wonderful puzzle.

I also feel aesthetically stuck. I am feeling too many choices in Haskell — do I take this option as a parameter, or do I stuff it in a reader monad? Similarly, do I characterize this computation as living in the Cont monad, or do I simply take a continuation as a parameter? When expressing a piece of a computation, do I return the “simplest” type which provides the necessary data, do I return a functor which informs how the piece is to be used, or do I just go ahead and traverse the final data structure right there? What if the simplest type that gives the necessary information is vacuous, and all the information is in how it is used?

You might be thinking to yourself, “yes, Luke, you are just designing software.” But it feels more arbitrary than that — I have everything I want to say and I know how it fits together. My physics professor always used to say “now we have to make a choice — which is bad, because we’re about to make the wrong one”. He would manipulate the problem until every decision was forced. I need a way to constrain my decisions, to find what might be seen as the unique most general type of each piece of this algorithm. There are too many ways to say everything.

]]>https://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/di-breakdown/feed/6luquiSentences and Paradigmshttps://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/sentences-and-paradigms/
https://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/sentences-and-paradigms/#commentsThu, 19 Jan 2012 22:32:42 +0000http://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/?p=1826Continue reading Sentences and Paradigms→]]>As our understanding progresses, what once were rigid distinctions tend to become blurred. Hence, I am fascinated by the pervasiveness and stability of the three programming language paradigms: imperative, functional (here I mean that word in the pure sense, not HOFs sense — Conal Elliott would probably have me call it denotational), and logical. Whole languages are beginning to blur their orientation, but specific solutions to problems are still typically classifiable along these lines nonetheless. We will see how the three are linked to forms human communication and the style of our discourse — and thus why these distinctions are so stable.

Each paradigm corresponds to a syntactic unit of language. The imperative, as the name suggests, corresponds to sentences in the imperative mood:

def bfs(predicate, root):
queue = Queue()
queue.add(root) # First, add the root to the queue.
while not queue.empty(): # While the queue is not empty, do the following:
node = queue.dequeue() # Take a node off the queue.
if predicate(node): # If it satisfies the predictate,
return node # return it.
for n in node.children(): # Otherwise,
queue.add(n) # add each of its children to the queue.

The program is written as a recipe, telling the computer what to do as if a servant. Note that, after qualifying phrases, each sentence begins with an action word in the imperative form, just as this sentence begins with “note”. The object-oriented aspect adds a sort of directorial role to the program, wherein the program is read not as the user telling the computer what to do, but the program telling objects in the program what to do. Sentences are still written in the imperative mood, they can now be directed: “queue, give me an element”, “handle, write down this line.”

But not every sentence in human discourse is imperative, for example this one. The logical captures sentences of relationship, such as:

captures(logical, relationships).

But perhaps we should see a more practical logical program as an example:

The program is written as a set of assertions, building a model of its world up from nothing. To run this program, you ask it questions about the world:

?- mirrors(X, [1,2,3]). % What mirrors [1,2,3]?
X = [3,2,1]

A great deal of human discourse falls into this category: propositional sentences. Most of the sentences in this post fall into that category. However, those familiar with Prolog will know that this is a poor implementation of mirrors (it is quadratic time), and would write it this way instead:

In proper logical style, mirror expresses itself as propositional relationships, with the caveat that the only relationship is “is”. Code written this way, relating things by identity rather than propositionally, is actually characteristic of functional style:

The R in the Prolog code is only connecting together propositions so that we can express this idea in a functional way. The original mirrors predicate is quite unlike this; expressing it in Haskell requires more than a mindless transliteration (however there are still hints of a structural similarity, if a bit elusive).

But I claim that “is” is not the defining linguistic characteristic of functional programs. We could write a functional program with a single equals sign if we were so obfuscatedly-minded; the analogous claim is invalid for logical and imperative programs. The characteristic device of functional programming is the noun: functional programs do not give instructions or express relationships, they are interested in defining objects.

bfs children xs = -- the BF traversal of xs is
xs ++ -- xs itself appended to
bfs (concatMap children xs) -- the BF traversal of each of xs's children

The monad is typically used to express instructions as nouns:

main = -- the main program is the recipe which
getLine >>= \name -> -- gets a line then
putStrLn $ "Hello, " ++ name -- puts "Hello, " prepended to that line

Haskell elites will object to me using IO as a prototypical example of a monad, but the claim is still valid; look at the words used to define monad actions: tell, ask, get, put, call. These are imperative words. This is not a sweeping generalization, however; for example, the constructors of Escardó’s search monad are nouns.

The following table summarizes the linguistic analogies:

Paradigm

Mechanism

Example

Imperative

Imperative mood

Put a piece of bread; put meat on top; put bread on top.

Logical

Propositional relationships

Bread sandwiches meat.

Functional

Noun phrases

Meat sandwiched by bread

Each of these paradigms is pretty good in its area. When we’re issuing commands in a functional language, we pretend we are using an imperative language; when we want to treat complex nouns (such as lists) in an imperative language, we are learning fall back on functional concepts to operate on them. When we are documenting our code or talking about types, we use logical ideas (typeclasses, generics).

The thing that makes me hubristically curious is the realization that these three categories hardly cover the mechanisms available in language. What else can we learn from human languages when expressing ourselves to computers?

This post has focused on the “content code” of the various paradigms. There is another kind of code (mostly in statically typed languages) that is interspersed with this, namely declarations:

class Player {...}
data Player = ...

I have not yet been able to find a good analogy for declarations in language; perhaps they introduce something like a proper noun. I will save this topic for another post.

]]>https://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/sentences-and-paradigms/feed/2luquiFlattr thisNew Languageshttps://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/new-languages/
https://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/new-languages/#commentsFri, 16 Dec 2011 12:08:30 +0000http://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/?p=1767Continue reading New Languages→]]>It has been some time since I learned a new programming language. Perhaps Haskell has me so firmly entrenched in “desirable properties” that any new language I look at either looks like another Javascript (a decent language sullied by terrible syntax) or Smalltalk (a decent language sullied by terrible engineering). I completely admit that I have had opportunities to learn new languages that I have turned down because I didn’t find the language’s ideas aesthetically pleasing after reading about them for ten minutes. But all in all I have been unimpressed by new languages and haven’t felt inspired to learn them to the degree I would need to use them.

It has also been some time since I have been excited about programming. My readers are surely aware of this as the topics of this blog meander this way and that away from my expertise. I used to love seeking the elegant design, simmering 200 lines down into 40, hypothesizing about language features and module systems, imagining worlds in which all modern software was built upon my paradigm.

I think these two things are related. I am not sure which way the causation goes, or even if there is a causal relationship. But thinking back on my time as a programmer, the times when I was most productive I was learning: working in a new language or working in a new domain. I still think CodeCatalog is a great idea, in total a few hard weeks’ work, and I can’t convince myself to write another line of the damned thing. That’s because I know how it’s gonna go; I know what I have to do; there is no mystery to it.

What if, instead of twisting my arm and trying to force myself into “good behavior”, I embraced this aspect of myself? There has to be some beautiful experimental kernel to that project; there has to be some beautiful way to express it. And it is certainly possible, even likely, that the result won’t end up looking and feeling like StackOverflow or Google Whatever (beta).

So what?

Have I been so brainwashed by the business of software that I will abandon a project because I cannot inspire myself to bring it to business standards? I think it’s because we wanted to make money. It would be nice not to have to worry about paying rent, I admit, but not worth exchanging for the beauty of an inspired work of code.

Someone invent a beautiful web/database language. I mean beautiful and unique — not practical or productive or real-world or familiar or interoperable or scalable. I don’t care about those adjectives, those are for engineers.

@stevedekorte – Threads sharing state by default is like variables being global by default.@luqui – state is like globals :-)@stevedekorte – @luqui only shared state – which is why FP ultimately fails – it trades comprehensibility for shared state optimizations@luqui – @stevedekorte, wow, sneaking “FP ultimately fails” as if an obvious truth in a reply to a Haskell programmer@stevedekorte – @luqui, a bit like sneaking in “[all] state is like globals” to an OO programmer? :-)@stevedekorte – @psnively @luqui my only issue with FP is the decision to trade expressivity and reusability for less state while calling it progress

The conversation goes on (and on) between many twitterites, having a fun but serious argument about this and that benefit of this and that style. Dynamic/static types come up, OO vs. functional, usefulness, mathematical foundation, learning curves; none of the standard artillery is spared. What irritates me about this style of argument is all the sweeping adjectives (1) used with no definition, thus impossible to support with evidence, and (2) synonymized with better.

In this post, I will draw attention to this irritating vocabulary, so that the next time you use it you can realize how little you are saying.

(Disclaimer: this post is not intended to criticize stevedekorte specifically, even though I identify two of the terms he used below. It was a long, typical programming zealot argument, and all parties involved were being equally dumb :-)

Expressive

A person is expressive if he expresses himself — he has an idea and wants to write it down. So I would say a language is expressive if it allows or enables the programmer to be expressive. Languages that restrict expression are not expressive. So we have the following facts:

Dynamically typed languages are more expressive than corresponding statically typed ones, because statically typed languages forbid you from expressing some ideas.

Multiparadigmatic languages are more expressive than languages which are paradigmatically pure, because the former allow you to express yourself if you are not thinking within the framework.

A language which you are fluent in is more expressive than a language you do not know very well.

By these observations, we might guess that Perl is the most expressive language, Haskell is the least.

Do you notice yourself already equating expressive with good, and thus perhaps feeling offended? Everyone wants an expressive language, right? Here are some reasons some programmers might not want an expressive language:

Most of my ideas are made of bullshit. Have you ever had a great idea, gone to write it in your blog, and realized it was nonsense because you were unable to write it? So writing is less expressive than thinking. Is thinking better than writing?

Every programmer has a different way of structuring their thoughts. An expressive language will bring out the differences in thought structure between programmers, and introduce impedance mismatches between programmers on a shared project.

I’m not arguing that expressiveness is bad. I’m just arguing that it doesn’t mean good, it means expressive.

Reusable

A language “is reusable” (to abuse language a bit) if code written in that language can be easily reused.

This “obvious” statement is hiding something very important; namely, reused how? For what? We are in an unfortunate situation in programming: code is designed to be reused in a particular way, and if you want to reuse it in a different way you are pretty much out of luck. An OO widget library is designed for the addition of new types of widgets, but if you want to reuse a program written in the library on a new platform you are in for a lot of work. A functional drawing library is designed so that you can transform and export your drawings in an open-ended variety of ways, composing new ways out of old ones; but if you need to draw a circle you have to build it out of lines, even if there is a much better way to draw a circle on your target. (This is essentially the expression problem).

An abstraction will always expose some things and conceal others. Different languages enable abstraction in different ways, which makes exposing certain things easier and others harder. The zealot will reply, “but in my experience, real-world programs are naturally organized around <insert preferred paradigm>, and <insert uncomfortable paradigm> doesn’t support that style as easily.” I would suggest to this zealot to look deeper into the definition of “real-world” to discover its many facets of subjectivity. (What domain do you work in? Who architected the real-world software you have worked on, and what was their background? What kinds of programs do you consider not to exist in the real world, and what values are you using to minimize them?)

Easy to learn

A language is easier to learn than another language if it takes less time to become competent/fluent programming in that language.

I don’t think this one is as automatically synonymized with “good”. Haskell programmers are aware how much relative effort was required to learn Haskell, and are usually grateful that they put in the effort. But all other things being equal, a language easier to learn ought to be better than one harder to learn.

The deadly omission in the above definition is that people are doing the learning. A language is easier or harder to learn to a single person, and that is entangled with their background, their approach, and their ambitions. When arguing “X is easier to learn than Y”, I encourage you to add one of the following phrases to the end:

for programmers who already know Z.

for people with a mathematical background.

for people with a non-mathematical background.

for children.

for me.

Or something similar. The following phrases do not count.

for almost everyone.

for people with a typical background.

for people who want to do useful things.

I’ll close this section with this remark: Haskell is the easiest language to learn, because I already know it.

Conclusion

I know I am frequently irritated by many of these kinds of words, and I’ve only mentioned three here. But you see where I am going. Respect the values of your fellow engineers. If you are a polyglot and like a paradigm, it probably comes from a set of values you have — a set of things you consider important, and that differ from the values of others. Concentrate on that; communicate your values, and try to understand the values of others. If you have toyed with a paradigm and quickly lost interest because of some surface feature (I have — e.g. I will throw out a language without support for closures) or impression, consider the possibility that you like what you like because simply because it is familiar (other equivalent notions: easy, natural). Which is fine, some people like to tinker with their thinking patterns more than others, but remember that you have trained yourself to think in a particular way, so consider that your “objective” judgements about these ultimately human languages could be biased.

(For the record, that last phrase originally read: “all of your ‘objective’ judgements about one of these ultimately human languages are biased”, which is quite a bit stronger than what I had intended)

]]>https://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/my-paradigm-is-better-than-your-paradigm/feed/17luquiFlattr thisFrameworkshttps://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/frameworks/
https://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/frameworks/#commentsTue, 30 Aug 2011 00:17:37 +0000http://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/?p=1504Continue reading Frameworks→]]>I’m in a postmodernism class at university this semester. Despite the eyerolling of my peers when I mention the topic, I find it very interesting so far. Today’s class got me thinking about some math.

In the past, I have worked a lot with frameworks for doing programming and math. I wanted to find a fundamental system in which all my ideas could be expressed; I latched on to Martin Bunder’s IΞ and IG as being particularly simple and beautiful. I used to be a compulsive programming language designer, searching for simple, beautiful ideas with which to express all programs. I still have the urge now and then, but never follow through anymore.

In today’s pomo class, we were talking about the postmodern view of modernism (as I suspect we will be for quite some time): having some framework in which to conceive of the world, of all of history, and viewing that framework as fundamental. If that framework begins to crack, then we throw it out and make a new framework (calling the new one “modern” this time) in which to conceive of everything. Postmodernism views this cycle as one that continues indefinitely in this stage of history.

Some of the culture of mathematics follows this trend (ZFC, NBG, Löf type theory, intuitionism), but especially programming languages follow this trend. We are always in seek of new frameworks in which all programs can be expressed: structured programming (Dijkstra), object-oriented, functional. There is leakage, but programmers tend to throw out old models with cracks and adopt new ones as if there will be no more cracks. There seems to be a swing toward the functional recently — dare we imagine that it has any cracks?

At this point I suspect some of you are already developing your indignant responses. As programmers, we are entrenched in modernist ideals. I seem to be criticizing this cycle, and surely if I am criticizing then something must replace it. Whatever replaces it is going to be just another cycle. Indeed, as I indulge in my postmodernistic ramblings (which I assure you I have no confidence in — it is only the second week), in the back of my mind I keep imagining a language which transcends these problems. But of course it does not, because it is itself just another fundamental system. The key for me, and all of us trapped in this mode of thought, is merely to observe without trying to replace it with something better, something new.

Another possible response is that this cycle of reinvention is the only way progress can be made. That is a very good point, but in it we are taking for granted the assumption that progress exists and is desirable.

Programming is a difficult thing to talk about in this context, because it is a medium that we use to create things, and we can (at least roughly) measure how good we are at creating things in various frameworks. Being good at creating things is an implicit goal for a programming system, which comes out of the idea that creating things is progress and progress is good. Mathematics may have a nature that will make this exploration clearer, and then we can perhaps take our realizations about mathematics and apply them back to programming.

You might say that mathematics is about progress. After all, the ultimate pursuit of mathematics is to prove as many theorems as possible; or so those who study mathematical frameworks would have you believe. I have never been enamored with math as a competition to prove theorems; I like it because it alters (not “improves”) the way I think. I replace constructs with which I used to represent ideas with new ones. I used to think of real numbers as “fractions with extra stuff”, now I think of them as programs incrementally refining information. It has led me to think more topologically and less algebraically. Is more topologically better? I doubt it; it is just more recent. It permits seeing analogies that we could not previously see, but at the same time it hides analogies that we could previously see (though we do not notice that half, because we have already developed our intuitions about those using the previous framework). Mathematicians of tomorrow may only think topologically, and they will find more analogies by “discovering” algebraic thinking.

Programming is not so different. I do love functional programming, but that is because I have taken a lot of time to develop those ideas. There are object oriented programmers who are very talented at expressing ideas in that language, and I cannot understand their designs (or, perhaps more accurately, why their designs should be considered better than many nearby designs). Good ol’ procedural structured programming is still a good way to communicate to a computer how to do something fast. As the future drives forward, the past is erased; when it is forgotten its niche will re-emerge and it will be re-invented.

]]>https://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/frameworks/feed/3luquiThe “Whole Program” Fallacyhttps://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/the-whole-program-fallacy/
https://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/the-whole-program-fallacy/#commentsFri, 20 May 2011 23:07:10 +0000http://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/?p=1475Continue reading The “Whole Program” Fallacy→]]>This StackOverflow question has generated a buzz of zealous reactions in the Haskell community. Here are the important bits of the question:

Basically, one has a record of options or something similar, that is initially set at the programs beginning. As the programmer is lazy, he don’t wants to carry the options record all over the program. … Now each part of the program has to use unsafePerformIO again, just to extract the options.

In my opinion, such a variable is considered pragmatically pure (don’t beat me). …

In this post I will give my own zealous reaction.

To ask a question like this assumes something about the nature of software. The assumption is hiding in these phrases: all over the program, each part of the program. Here, the poster assumes that a program is a large, monolithic beast such that every part of it will need access to this variable, and yet the definition of this variable is not known to the programmer. That means that the program depends on this value. If we purely model the structure of the above example program, we see that every function depends on OptionRecord. So we have (taking the context of a compiler):

These are perhaps not the cleanest signatures for parse, compile, and simplify, but they are conceivable in the real world. There is some junk — surely not all three of those functions depend on every option of OptionRecord. It would be cleaner to declare that they depend on exactly the things they actually depend on.

But the problem becomes much more unsettling at freeVars. freeVars takes an OptionRecord — staying true to the original problem description, it must, because it or a function it calls may end up depending options. But what on earth could a global OptionRecord determine about a free variables function? Perhaps there are multiple ways to find free variables — do we count type variables, what scoping mechanism to use — but those are not global options. Different functions will require different behaviors out of that function depending on what they are doing.

We even get such pathologies as shortestPath :: OptionRecord -> Graph -> Node -> Node -> [Node] — a plain, simple, reusable graph algorithm which somehow depends on this global options record. We have no way of telling the compiler — or, more importantly, ourselves — that this algorithm really has nothing to do with the specific compiler we are implementing. Somewhere deep in shortestPath‘s call chain, there is a call to some function which calls an error function which depends on one of the options. Suddenly this beautiful, well-defined function is not reusable. To take it out and use it in another project means to include OptionsRecord in that project, and OptionsRecord has things about compiler and type system extensions, configuration files, who-knows-what, but certainly having nothing to do with graphs. Sure, we can go and dig out the OptionsRecord, replace it with a record that is more suited to the program we are reusing the code in. But you have to go read, understand, mutate code that you just want to work please so you can get on with your project. We have all suffered the head-throbbing pain of integration problems. This is their source.

When I think of software as thousands of lines of specification for something, my mind jumps to problems like the original question. How am I going to write something so huge purely without it being really inconvenient? I see the need for global options, often global state, things ending with Manager (often a global trying to convince you it is a good abstraction), big systems talking about big ideas which are only applicable to my project.

But I have begun to think about software another way. Consider 100 lines. That is potentially a lot of information. The only reason 100 lines is not very much in the code world is because we lack the vocabulary to say what we mean. We are caught up in the details of manipulating lists of identifiers, building sorting trees, defining what we mean by “first” in this or that context. Could you describe your project in 100 lines of English? Perhaps not, but you could get a lot closer than with 100 lines of code.

I’m beginning to think that my latest greatest software project should be as small as possible. I need to build up vocabulary so I can describe it in a small space, but that vocabulary is not a part of my project. That vocabulary belongs to everyone in the same-ish domain of software. And nobody else cares about the meaning of OptionsRecord.

When I think of software this way, the idea that I need to pass around an OptionsRecord as a parameter to every function in my project starts to make sense. Every part of my project depends on its options, but my project is just a little thing that is standing on the shoulders of the giants of vocabulary used to get it there. I don’t mind passing options around between a few functions after I load them.

This is an ideal. I hope to move software closer to this ideal with my CodeCatalog project. Your current project probably cannot be phrased in a few hundred lines right now. But think about what it would look like if you structured it as a small main program + a lot of supporting vocabulary. Think of the supporting vocabulary as something any project could use. What does that mean for the modularity, reusability, and adaptability of your code? What does it mean for the clarity of your specification? What does it mean about the concept of “architecture”?

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